But who will make this extension ? Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use H264 on Firefox ? If H264 become standard, every browser will have to pay the license fee. What if a new team of developers decide that all browsers sucks and they want to create their own, just like the Mozilla team did ? They will have to pay 5 millions if they want to distribute a browser that people could really use (almost nobody would use a browser that doesn't play their favorite videos).

"Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use H264 on Firefox ?"

I've already paid for my H.264 licenses. Now I just want to use them. The PC to my left has a video card with licensed H.264 that I paid for and free software that harnesses it, the Mac in front of me has both a video card with licensed H.264 and a licensed software decoder and I paid for both, the Windows 7 VM running in the Mac even has a licensed H.264 decoder that I paid for, the phone to my right has licensed H.264 that I paid for, heck the linux-based set-top box in the living room has hardware in it with licensed H.264 decoding and as I'm sure you can guess I'll point out that I paid for that license too. :)

"If H264 become standard, every browser will have to pay the license fee."

Why? I just want Firefox to let me use the licenses I have already paid for.

All they have to do is defer to the appropriate operating system -level decoding support as many have suggested. That they are refusing to do so suggests to me that this has nothing to do with licensing fees and has everything to do with something else we've not quite uncovered yet.

At the end of the day, though, unless the Mozilla folks change their course I can easily see techies supporting family and/or business by saying "just install Chrome" the same way they used to (and to an extent still do, I suppose) say "just install Firefox" when their supported userbase complained about IE. The real risk now is that even if in the end Mozilla's issue is purely one of ideology it won't stop them from having become irrelevant in the process.

The browser has to take responsibility for its formats. Offloading to the OS is all fine and good if you have a native H.264 decoder installed, but only Windows 7 and OS X only ship with that. Most users out there are still using XP. Most users are not going to understand if Firefox comes up and says "Hey buddy you need to install some codec from OS vendor to watch this, teehee", and they'll just switch to something else, so it's kind of useless in that regard.

Good point. Though they could theoretically setup a separate financial entity that paid 5 million but was separate from the Mozilla foundation. And this separate entity might not really have to pay fees until 2015 or something unless I'm reading it wrong. Anyway, viva theora. It would be cool if there were some legal move they could do to get around the issue is all..

"But why couldn't Mozilla use an extension that supports H264? Similar to Ubuntu's nonfree packages?"

That might not be an unreasonable approach concerning some other aspect of video on the Web, but has only bad consequences in this particular debate.

As you can see, this debate involves Mozilla and co. versus detractors over the following two non-exclusive decision problems:

Support Theora? Support h.264?

But it's incredibly important to keep in mind the greater issue here motivating these questions, which is the desire for a baseline video format. As soon as anyone suggests delegating video decoding to the operating system, they're clearly divorcing themselves from this particular debate. Perhaps that kind of delegation is a solution to a problem concerning another aspect of video on the Web, but not this one, because it gains nothing in the pursuit for a baseline video format.